« Mediations » - Susan Meiselas/Instituto Moreira Sales, Sao Paulo, Brazil

mardi 15 octobre au lundi 3 février 2020

  • USA. NYC. 1978. Little Italy. Hanging out on Baxter Street.

    © Susan Meiselas /Magnum Photos

  • USA. Fryeburg, Maine. 1975. Between shows. « Carnival strippers »

    © Susan Meiselas /Magnum Photos

  • USA. Greenville, South Carolina. 1974. Myra and friends.

    © Susan Meiselas /Magnum Photos

  • Nicaragua. Esteli. 1979. Sandinistas at the walls of the Esteli National Guard 

    © Susan Meiselas /Magnum Photos

  • Nicaragua. June, 1978. Youths practice throwing contact bombs in forest surrounding Monimbo

    © Susan Meiselas /Magnum Photos

  • El Salvador. 1980. Soldiers search bus passengers along the Northern Highway.

    © Susan Meiselas /Magnum Photos

  • El Salvador. 1983. Road to Aguilares

    © Susan Meiselas /Magnum Photos

  • Northern Iraq. Kurdistan. Arbil. 1991. Jamal Keder Osman shows a picture 

    © Susan Meiselas /Magnum Photos

  • Collaged police report and photograph, San Francisco, from the series « Archives of Abuse », 1992.

    © Susan Meiselas /Magnum Photos

  • USA. Cambridge, MA. 1971. 44 Irving St. Selfportrait.

    © Susan Meiselas /Magnum Photos


“The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.” — Susan Meiselas

Susan Meiselas (1948, Baltimore, USA), a member of Magnum Photos since 1976, became known for her work in the conflict zones of Central America (1978–1983), and in particular for her powerful photographs of the Nicaraguan revolution. Endlessly exploring and developing narratives, she involves her subjects in her works, often working over long time spans and covering a wide range of subjects and countries, from war to human rights issues and cultural identity to the sex industry. This exhibition, entitled Mediations after an eponymous work, is the most comprehensive retrospective ever held in Europe, bringing together a selection of works from the 1970s to the present day. Mediations (1978–1982) is based on Meiselas’s initial experience during the popular insurrection in Nicaragua. The selection process of her images for the publication Nicaragua : June 1978–July 1979 and the use of the same photographs by the mass media left her with many questions about how images are used in different contexts. Towards the end of the 1990s, Meiselas started to use archive material that she collected, published and exhibited as part of multimedia installations, thereby giving a voice to individuals and communities subject to violence and oppression.
Meiselas often adopts different approaches to extend her work in various forms : photographic essays, installations, books or films. For example, the documents used in the book Kurdistan:In the Shadow of History (1997) became an online archive of collective memory, akaKURDISTAN (1998), which is currently shown as an on-going project in the form of a “Storymap” created by contributors from the global Kurdish diaspora. Working as an editor, she initiated two collaborative projects highlighting the work of regional photographers – El Salvador : The Work of Thirty Photographers (1983) and Chile from Within (1991). The latter focused on work by photographers living under the Pinochet regime. Meiselas has also worked on four films on Nicaragua : she co-directed Living at Risk : The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1985), Pictures from a Revolution (1991) and Reframing History (2004), and contributed to Voyages (1985).

This exhibition reveals Meiselas’s unique approach as a photographer who has constantly questioned the status of her images in relation to the context in which they are perceived, showing how she moves through different scales of time and conflict, ranging from the personal
to the geopolitical dimension.

Carles Guerra and Pia Viewing Exhibition curators